So... why Jeopardy? IBM is trying to demonstrate software that can parse text for meaning. That's great. But there are plenty of other places/formats/etc. that you can demonstrate this technology. There are certainly far more useful applications of this sort of technology.

I'm guessing that they they are going after J! because...
1) The warm spotlight of a well-known TV show
2) There is still a lot of structure and form on J! that it's easier to achieve "success" than if they had the machine do something more free-form... e.g., read a novel and generate a plot summary or, heavens forbid, actually understand real human conversation
3) The computer could have other advantages, like impeccable buzzer timing (which is sometimes more important than actual knowledge, especially in the Tournament of Champions) and having memorized the material beforehand (the NYT indicates that it would have "read" study materials before the match), which also helps increase the likelihood of "success"

And to pile on the criticism of grandstanding, the machine will be fed electronic text. So no video camera to perform text recognition? No speech recognition (IBM afraid of the "wreck a nice beach" vs. "recognize speech" problem tripping up their theatrics?). And what use would this be? At least the AI text research done at Google is being put to good use, like improving their machine translation services. Aside from getting IBM's name plastered in the media, what exactly is this going to do?

And me without my mod points!

Yea, that's one of the great challenges, and if you ever watch a high-caliber contest (like the recent Tournament of Champions), you'll notice that the buzzer timing often plays a MORE important role than the actual knowledge.

But this whole IBM thing is just theatrics anyway. The computer has impeccable timing and a limitless database of knowledge. All they are proving is that it can recognize and parse human speech. But they don't need Jeopardy! for that. They could demonstrate that anywhere using any medium that they want. It just so happens that they think that they'll get a bigger spotlight if they do J! (plus, the structure and format of the show will probably make it easier to achieve "success", whereas having the machine recognize day-to-day conversation would be far more difficult).

Uh, $87 for 100/100 is still extremely cheap compared to US prices. And you can't even get 24/1 ADSL in the US...

In the NPR piece about this, one TW representative compared the current scheme to someone buying a salad and someone else buying an expensive lobster dinner, and the two of them splitting the cost 50-50. In other words, the heavy user is subsidized by the light user. But if this is their rationale, then making the heavy user pay for his/her fair share would mean that the light users would no longer have to subsidize the heavy users and that the light users should see lower prices.

But that was nowhere in TW's plan, which is why this all seemed disingenuous. I, for one, think it's fair for people who use more to pay more. But not when that is used as an excuse for price gouging. It seems much more likely that TW is just trying to protect their content delivery services from people getting movies digital competitors like Netflix's download service, which would been an abuse of market powers.

Mod parent up!

The more we keep our heads in the sand (and skewing article quotes like this certainly doesn't help), the less likely Linux has a chance to succeed.

It's so much easier to blame someone else than to look within and see one's own flaws. Linux's lack of a supporting ecosystem is partly the fault of a small market share, but that doesn't mean that Linux supporters should neglect that they aren't good tenders of their ecosystem. There are some apps from 2 decades ago that are binary-compatible and can run on a modern Windows box. Can the same be said for Linux or Mac? Linux can't win on the desktop until it starts realizing that there's more to Microsoft's monopoly than Evil Tactics.

One of the problems that I see in the Linux world is that many of us are quick to cry "monopoly" and blame it on unfair practices.

So if it's because of Microsoft's dominant market share, why does Apple do so well in the markets that it is in (at least in terms of return rates)?

Blaming it on Microsoft is a cop-out because it lets people avoid the harsh reality that the fault really lies with Linux. Linux is far, far from passing the Aunt Tillie test. Ubuntu is nice in that it's trying to be more consumer-oriented, but so far, most of its changes are superficial.

And finally, one person's "superior" is another person's design flaw. Apple is "superior" and "innovative" (that's debatable) mostly because Apple doesn't give a damn about its ecosystem. Microsoft does. It bends over backwards and even consciously duplicates buggy behavior, all in the name of backwards compatibility (given the HUGE diversity of software and hardware in the Windows ecosystem, the (relatively small) amount of breakage between each version of Windows is actually a testament to Microsoft's ecosystem cultivation). Is this technically superior? Probably not from an orthodox perspective. Does it make sense? I think so. THIS is why Microsoft has its monopoly. Until Linux can start cultivating such an ecosystem (no, telling someone that they can just download the source and compile it for their system does not cut it), it will always remain on the sidelines. Period.